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    The Mission of God's People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission
    The Mission of God's People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission
    The Mission of God's People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission
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    The Mission of God's People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission

    By Christopher J. H. Wright

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    What does the Bible say about God's purpose for us, the witness of the church, and our mission to spread the message of the gospel?

    Chris Wright's pioneering 2006 book, The Mission of God, revealed that the typical Christian understanding of "missions" encompasses only a small part of God's overarching mission for the world. God is relentlessly reclaiming the whole of creation for himself, and each of us fit into that big-picture plan.

    In The Mission of God's People, Wright argues that having a strong biblical theology that shapes our thinking and behavior must be in place before answering the call of the Great Commission. Wright first steps back and answers some of the biggest questions of God's story and our place within it:

    • Who are the people of God?
    • What kind of people are we?
    • What are the priorities and limits of our mission?
    • What exactly is the gospel that lies at the core of our mission?
    • What was it that made Christianity a missionary faith from the very start?

     

    While answering these essential questions, Wright thoroughly details what the Old and New Testaments teach Christians about being God's people. He addresses questions of both ecclesiology (the theology of the church) and missiology (the practice and methodology of missions) with topics like "called to care for creation," "called to bless the nations," "sending and being sent, and "rejecting false gods."

    ____________

    Part of the Biblical Theology for Life series, this practical and robust book will help you and your church ground your witness-bearing purpose and worship on the solid foundation of biblical understanding and reflection.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherZondervan
    Release dateSep 7, 2010
    ISBN9780310323037
    Author

    Christopher J. H. Wright

    Christopher J. H. Wright es director internacional de Langham Partnership International, donde tomó el cargo que ocupó John R. W. Stott durante treinta años. También sirve como presidente de la junta directiva del Grupo de Trabajadores del Comité Teológico Lausana y del Panel de recursos teológicos del fondo TEAR, una fundación líder en la ayuda para cristianos y desarrollo caritativo. Es autor de un sinnúmero de libros, incluyendo Conociendo a Jesús a través del Antiguo Testamento, Ética del Antiguo Testamento para log hijos de Dios, y el galardonado La Misión de Dios. Chris y su esposa, Luz, tienen cuatro hijos y cinco nietos.

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      A very complete study, touching all aspects of the mission task, a great resource

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    The Mission of God's People - Christopher J. H. Wright

    SERIES PREFACE

    The question What does the Bible have to say about that? is, in essence, what the Biblical Theology for Life series is all about. Not unlike other biblical explorations of various topics, the volumes in this series articulate various themes in biblical theology, but they always do so with the So what? question rumbling about and demanding to be answered. Too often, books on biblical theology have focused mainly on description— simply discerning the teachings of the biblical literature on a particular topic. But contributors to this series seek to straddle both the world of the text and the world in which we live.

    This means that their descriptions of biblical theology will always be understood as the important first step in their task, which will not be completed until they draw out that theology’s practical implications for the contemporary context. Contributors therefore engage both in the description of biblical theology and in its contemporary contextualization, accosting the reader’s perspective and fostering application, transformation, and growth. It is our hope that these informed insights of evangelical biblical scholarship will increasingly become enfleshed in the sermons and discussions that transpire each week in places of worship, in living rooms where Bible studies gather, and in classrooms around the world. We hope that this series will lead to personal transformation and practical application in real life.

    Every volume in this series has the same basic structure. In the first section, entitled Queuing the Questions, authors introduce the main questions they seek to address in their books. Raising these questions enables you to see clearly from the outset what each book will be pursuing, inviting you to participate in the process of discovery along the way. In the second section, Arriving at Answers, authors develop the biblical theology of the topic they address, focusing their attention on specific biblical texts and constructing answers to the questions introduced in section one. In the concluding Reflecting on Relevance section, authors contextualize their biblical theological insights, discussing specific ways in which the theology presented in their books addresses contemporary situations and issues, giving you opportunities to consider how you might live out that theology in the world today.

    Long before you make it to the Reflecting on Relevance section, however, we encourage you to wrestle with the implications of the biblical theology being described by considering the Relevant Questions that conclude each chapter. Frequent sidebars spice up your experience, supplementing the main discussion with significant quotations, illustrative historical or contemporary data, and fuller explanations of the content.

    In sum, the goal of the Biblical Theology for Life series is communicated by its title. On the one hand, its books mine the Bible for theology that addresses a wide range of topics, so that you may know the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom [he] sent (John 17:3). On the other hand, contributing authors contextualize this theology in ways that allow the life-giving Word (John 1:4; 20:31) to speak into and transform contemporary life.

    Series Editor

    Jonathan Lunde

    PREFACE

    "So this is the simplified version of The Mission of God, then?" is a comment I have heard quite often while working on this book, and have needed to correct, and do so again here. It is true that a few years ago I published The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative¹ and, true, that is a rather big book. The dif ference between it and this one, however, is much more than just their relative size.

    In The Mission of God I was arguing for a missional hermeneutic of the whole Bible. My concern was to ask if it is possible and right for Christians to read their whole Bible from the perspective of the mission of God and what happens when they do. The argument of that book is that all the great sections of the canon of Scripture, all the great episodes of the Bible story, all the great doctrines of the biblical faith, cohere around the Bible’s central character – the living God and his grand plan and purpose for the whole of creation. The mission of God is what unifies the Bible from creation to new creation. That book lays the foundation for this one.

    In this book, I am asking the so what? question on behalf of those of us whom this God of the Bible has called into saving and covenant relationship with himself – the church, the people of God from Abraham to the population of the city of God in Revelation. Who are we and what are we here for? If the Bible renders to us the grand mission of God through all generations of history, what does it tell us about the mission of God’s people in each generation, including our own? What is our mission?

    This specific focus on the mission of the church means that we will not be surveying every biblical doctrine that could be said to be relevant to mission in general. There are many of those. For example, the nature of the incarnation, the doctrine of the atonement, the great truth of the resurrection, the doctrine of judgment, the doctrine of God’s sovereign providence, the Trinity – all these have huge implications in a broader theology of mission. And they will also doubtless be topics for other books in this series on Biblical Theology for Life. I have not tried to address them all, except as they emerge naturally in discussion of the texts we will survey in our exercise in biblical theology.

    In this volume, our prime concern is simply to ask the question: What does the Bible as a whole in both testaments have to tell us about why the people of God exist and what it is they are supposed to be and do in the world? What is the mission of God’s people?

    So we will be exploring the Bible, as you’d expect in a book of biblical theology. For reasons of space, it is not possible to print out in full every passage of Scripture that is referred to in the chapters to follow, though key ones that come in for extended study will be. So this is the kind of book that, really, you just have to read with an open Bible ready to hand. I would urge you to pause regularly to check out the references and read them. Imitate the Bereans, if you like, who even when they had the apostle Paul teaching them, examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true (Acts 17:11).

    A small note on the name of God: most of the time I have followed the English translation tradition and used the Lord or the LORD for the divine name in the Old Testament. But when it seemed important to emphasize that this God had a personal, revealed name, which distinguished him as the one true living God from all other so-called gods, I have used the four Hebrew letters – YHWH. Nobody seems quite sure exactly how it was pronounced, though Yahweh has become common.

    I am grateful to Jonathan Lunde (the Series Editor) and Katya Covrett (Senior Acquisitions Editor at Zondervan) for inviting me to contribute to this exciting new series, Biblical Theology for Life (what other kind of biblical theology should there be?). It is particularly pleasing to be paired with Jonathan in the first two volumes in the series, since perhaps no title could go better with this book on the mission of God’s people than his on the biblical theology of discipleship. For disciples we are and disciples we are to make more of, said Jesus.

    I am grateful too to InterVarsity Press, which published my book The Mission of God, for the permission granted me to quote significant portions of that book.

    It may become apparent as you read what follows that many of the texts we will look at are ones I have preached on. Thus, often that sermonic atmosphere survives in the exposition and application of the text. I have not tried to conceal that. After all, it is hoped that this series will be of help to pastors and preachers, and it is certainly one of the passions of my own ministry to preach on mission as often as I can – from the Old Testament especially.

    And that explains the dedication too. Our youngest daughter, Suzannah, probably heard more of my sermons on mission than any other living soul, by accompanying my wife, Liz, and me on many occasions to churches of all shapes and sizes for mission weekends. Some of those sermons she heard so often she would mimic them mercilessly later. I trust that this book will do more than recall that nostalgic mimicry, but also foster the missional commitment to Christ that she now shares with her husband, Edmund. The book, finished just a few weeks too late to serve as a wedding present, is dedicated to them both with love and prayer.

    Christopher J. H. Wright

    October 2009

    INTRODUCTION

    Think of a doctrine – any doctrine between 200 and 2000 (AD). Multiply it by historic confessions. Divide by denominational variations. Add a suspicion of heresy. Subtract the doctrine you first thought of. And what are you left with? Probably just about the sum of what theology and mission have in common in the mind of your average Christian – not much.

    Theology, after all, is all in the head – reflection, argument, teachings, creeds and confessions of faith. We think of a theological library where ideas get stored. Mission, or missions, is doing – practical, dynamic, achieving results. We think of the mission field where people go and do exciting stuff. Not only do theology and mission not seem to have much in common in themselves, it is easy to get the impression that most of those interested in the one have little interest in the other.

    I am the son of missionary parents and I studied theology at Cambridge. But the two seemed to have little connection in my youthful zeal as a Christian. They certainly had no connection in my Cambridge theology studies, where (as far as I remember) missiology was not even a word at the time. Most of my Christian friends who were interested in supporting and praying for missionary work were not interested in theology, beyond weekly Bible studies. And the theology department certainly wasn’t interested in mission.

    Theology, it seems, is all about God. It rummages around in what (mostly dead) people have thought and written about God, God’s character and actions, God’s relationship to the world, to human society, God’s involvement in the past, present and future, and the like. Mission, in happy contrast, is all about us the living, and what we (or some of us at least) believe we are supposed to be doing in the world to help God along a bit. Mission seems to be about helping God to get over those barriers of strange cultures and faraway places that he seems to have such difficulty crossing.

    So, in mutual suspicion, theologians may not relish their theories being muddied by facts on the ground and the challenging questions thrown up by the messiness of practical mission. Practitioners of mission, in quick riposte, may not wish to see their urgent commitment to getting on with the job Christ entrusted to us delayed by indulgent navel-gazing about obscure long words ending in – ology.

    And so the dangerous result is that theology proceeds without missional input or output, while mission proceeds without theological guidance or evaluation.

    My hope is that this book will at least help to answer that broad question, "What do theology and mission have to do with each other? And of course, this series is called Biblical Theology for Life, so we are thinking especially of that branch of theology known as biblical theology" – with its attempt to embrace the broad and unifying theological themes that span the whole of the Bible, though articulated in different ways within the great variety of the canon.

    Now, I don’t know which of the phrases on the cover of this book most moved you to buy it (or at least to be reading it) – The Mission of God’s People, or A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission. That is, I don’t know whether you are primarily excited by mission (and perhaps wondering how it connects with theology, if at all), or whether you are primarily interested in biblical theology (and perhaps mildly puzzled at the thought that mission would be included in its scope: isn’t mission what comes after the Bible? Doesn’t mission come in the practical theology box, along with homiletics, pastoralia, evangelism, etc.?). Either way, I hope that one major result of reading this book is that you will gain a satisfactory answer to those questions and understand that biblical theology and mission are integrally related to each other.

    There should be no theology that does not relate to the mission of the church – either by being generated out of the church’s mission or by inspiring and shaping it. And there should be no mission of the church carried on without deep theological roots in the soil of the Bible.

    No theology without missional impact; no mission without theological foundations.

    That is the vision that inspires this modest essay.

    PART ONE

    QUEUING THE QUESTIONS

    CHAPTER 1

    WHO ARE WE AND WHAT ARE WE HERE FOR?

    MISSION OR MISSIONS?

    The title of the book, The Mission of God’s People, immediately sends a question to the top of the queue. It is a question of definition: What pops into our mind when we see or hear the word mission? Perhaps we are more familiar with it in the form missions, which usually brings to mind all the cross-cultural missionary work of the churches we are familiar with. We think of missionary societies, of evangelistic and church-planting missions, of long-term career missionaries or short-term missions, and of global networks of such agencies and individuals, like the Lausanne Movement.

    God’s Sending

    All of these images have in common the notion of sending and being sent. That sense, of course, lies at the Latin root of the word mission itself, and is very appropriate. And very biblical too. There is no doubt that the Bible shows God sending many people on a mission from God, and the missionary movement in the book of Acts begins with a church responding to that divine impulse by sending Paul and Barnabas out on their first missionary journey.

    But recognizing that mission has at its heart a sense of sending and being sent only raises another question: sent to do what? The Bible tells us that God did send many people. But the range of things for which people were sent is staggeringly broad. Sending language is used in all the following stories. Joseph was sent (unwittingly at first) to be in a position to save lives in a famine (Gen. 45:7). Moses was sent (unwillingly at first) to deliver people from oppression and exploitation (Ex. 3:10). Elijah was sent to influence the course of international politics (1 Kings 19:15 – 18). Jeremiah was sent to proclaim God’s Word (e.g., Jer. 1:7). Jesus claimed the words of Isaiah that he was sent to preach good news, to proclaim freedom, to give sight for the blind, and to offer release from oppression (Lk 4:16 – 19; cf. Isa. 61:1).

    The disciples were sent to preach and demonstrate the delivering and healing power of the reign of God (Matt. 10:5 – 8). As apostles they were sent to make disciples, baptize and teach (Matt. 28:18 – 20). Jesus sent them into the world in the same way that the Father had sent him, which raises a lot of interesting questions and challenges (John 17:18; 20:21). Paul and Barnabas were sent with famine relief (Acts 11:27 – 30). Later they were sent for evangelism and church planting (Acts 13:1 – 3). Titus was sent to ensure trustworthy and transparent financial administration (2 Cor. 8:16 – 24). Later he was sent for competent church administration (Titus 1:5). Apollos was sent as a skilled Bible teacher for church nurture (Acts 18:27 – 28). Many unnamed brothers and sisters were sent out as itinerant teachers for the sake of the truth of the gospel (3 John 5 – 8).

    So, even if we agree that the concept of sending and being sent lies at the heart of mission, there is a broad range of biblically sanctioned activities that people may be sent by God to do, including famine relief, action for justice, preaching, evangelism, teaching, healing and administration. Yet when we use the words missions and missionaries, we tend to think mainly of evangelistic activity. What will our biblical theology have to say to that? We will think about this more in chapter 12.

    God’s Purpose

    It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission – God’s mission.

    Chris Wright²

    Another common usage of the word mission, however, is a sense of purpose or goal-orientation. Even in the secular world we talk about organizations having a corporate mission, which may well be summed up in a pithy mission statement. So to ask the question, What is the mission of God’s people? is really to ask, For what purpose do those who call themselves the people of God actually exist? What are we here on earth for?

    But to answer that we have to go one step further back and ask, Whose mission is it anyway? And of course, the answer to that has to be – it is the mission of God. God himself has a mission. God has a purpose and goal for his whole creation. Paul called this the whole will [plan] of God (Acts 20:27; cf. Eph. 1:9 – 10). And as part of that divine mission, God has called into existence a people to participate with God in the accomplishment of that mission. All our mission flows from the prior mission of God. And that, as we will see, is broad indeed. Mission arises from the heart of God himself, and is communicated from his heart to ours. Mission is the global outreach of the global people of a global God.¹

    Singular and Plural

    That broad definition allows us to include many different missions within the category of mission. Perhaps the easiest way I can explain the difference that I perceive between talking about mission (singular) and missions (plural) is to use analogies from other human activities.

    We can speak about science (singular), and we have a generic concept in mind. It speaks of the challenge of discovery, experimentation and explanation. It speaks of a method, an ethos, a system of values, certain paradigms that govern scientific enquiry, a certain kind of faith and a strong kind of commitment. Science is a dimension of human life and civilization.

    But then there are sciences. When we use the word in the plural, we are speaking of a whole vast range of activities which have scientific aims, methods, criteria and controls. There are physical sciences, with many subdivisions in the exploration of the natural world and our universe. There are social sciences, life sciences, and the like. And then there’s the science of economics. And statistics. But let’s not stray into science fiction.

    My point is, science is a generic word for a whole array of human endeavour that can be characterized as sciences. There is a multitude of activities that can be justly characterized as science, and from time to time scientists themselves argue over whether this or that particular activity is really science at all. But (rather like the parts in Paul’s description of the body), one legitimate science cannot say to another, because you are not physics, you are not real science. Nor can one legitimate science say about itself, because I am not physics, I don’t belong to the world of science. There is a universal concept, broadly understood, and there is a multiplicity of embodiments of it in practical life.

    One could build the same analogy with regard to art and the arts, or to sport and sports. There are all kinds of artistic and sporting activities, but we know what we mean when we use a generic concept like art or sport to include that variety and multiplicity.

    So when I speak of mission, I am thinking of all that God is doing in his great purpose for the whole of creation and all that he calls us to do in cooperation with that purpose. Mission, like science, has a conceptual, generic breadth, and a word like missional can be as broad in significance as scientific. And I would suggest that the word missionary should have the same kind of breadth of possibility as the word scientist. Like the latter, it is a word you have to fill with specific meaning rather than assume or imagine what the said person actually does.

    But when I speak of missions, I am thinking of the multitude of activities that God’s people can engage in, by means of which they participate in God’s mission. And it seems to me there are as many kinds of missions as there are kinds of sciences – probably far more in fact. And in the same way, in the variety of missions God has entrusted to his church as a whole, it is unseemly for one kind of mission to dismiss another out of a superiority complex, or to undervalue itself as not real mission out of an inferiority complex. The body image has powerful resonance here too.

    That is why I also dislike the old knock-down line that sought to ring-fence the word mission for specifically cross-cultural sending of missionaries for evangelism: If everything is mission, then nothing is mission. It would seem more biblical to say, If everything is mission…everything is mission. Clearly, not everything is cross-cultural evangelistic mission, but everything a Christian and a Christian church is, says and does should be missional in its conscious participation in the mission of God in God’s world.

    Perhaps you have heard of this definition of mission? World evangelization requires the whole church to take the whole Gospel to the whole world. It comes from the Lausanne Covenant.³ It is a fine ringing slogan, which actually has even earlier roots.⁴ But each of its three phrases leads us into a cluster of questions. It provides a convenient framework to set out some of the issues that our biblical theology of mission will address – though not necessarily in this particular order.

    THE WHOLE WORLD

    The Whole World as the Goal of God’s Mission

    What’s the world coming to? we sometimes ask when things seem just too much beyond our understanding or control. But it’s a good question to ask when we are thinking about the mission of God’s people too, for it points us towards a future that ultimately lies in God’s hands. As we said above, our mission flows from God’s mission, and God’s mission is for the sake of his whole world – indeed his whole creation.

    So we have to start by seeing ourselves within the great flow of God’s mission, and we must make sure that our own missional goals – long term and more immediate – are in line with God’s. For that purpose, we need to know the story we are part of, the great story that the Bible tells that encompasses the past and the future.

    But how many churches that are keen on mission, or how many mission agencies that pursue their agendas with urgency and zeal pause to think about that great story – where it has come from so far, what shape it has from the whole Bible (not just a few missionary verses), and where it is going? And yet if our mission efforts lose touch with that story or set off on all kinds of tangents from it, we have to ask: Whose mission are we on? Whose agenda are we pursuing?

    So our first task in Part 2 will be to gain some necessary orientation by giving attention to the story we are part of if we consider ourselves to be God’s people on God’s mission. That will be our focus in chapter 2.

    The Whole World and the Scope of Our Mission

    God’s mission, we will find from the Bible, includes the whole of creation. But where does that truth lead us in terms of our mission on earth? Especially, what does it imply for our treatment of that part of creation entrusted to us – planet Earth? It is generally accepted among Christians (and more widely) that we ought to be good stewards of the earth’s resources. But do we have a missional responsibility beyond that level of moderately responsible living? We are all conscious of the ecological challenges that face the human race. We may rightly feel confused in the welter of alleged facts and scary projections, not knowing how much is objective reality and how much is the result of media frenzy or political machination. Nobody can seriously doubt that we face enormous global problems, but we may well differ widely over the best way forward from where we seem to have reached.

    But is this a matter that should be on the agenda of Christian mission? How does our biblical theology help us address that question? At the very least, one might say, if the goal of God’s mission is the new creation that we anticipate from the climax of the Bible’s story, then mission in the midst of the story ought to have some place for our response to creation as it is now. Traditionally, however, the concept of mission in Christian circles has been confined to the needs of human beings. So, is ecological concern and action a biblically legitimate missional concern, or merely a contemporary obsession driven by the world’s agenda? We will think about that question in chapter 3.

    The Whole World as the Arena of Our Mission

    Where does missionary work begin and end? We so easily fall into compartmentalized thinking, splitting up our world into different zones. The very word mission often comes along with the notion of the mission field, which normally means foreign countries out there, but not here at home. This has been a Western way of looking at the world, but it is also found in other parts of the world that now have strong missionary-sending churches. The reality is, of course, as soon as you think seriously about it, that the mission field is everywhere, including your own street – wherever there is ignorance or rejection of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

    But another equally damaging false dichotomy is between the so-called sacred and secular realms, and mission is located firmly in the first. So mission is something either that specially commissioned Christians manage to do full-time, if they can get enough support to do so, or something that other Christians (the vast majority) do in odd moments of time they have to spare from the necessity of having to work for a living. Maybe they can fit a mission trip into a vacation, or go on a church mission over the weekend.

    But what about the rest of life? What about the rest of the world – the world of work, the public arena, the world of business, education, politics, medicine, sports, and the like? In what sense is that world the arena of the mission of God’s people, and what does such mission consist of? Is it only the moments of evangelistic opportunity in that world, or can our work itself participate in God’s mission?

    The Church must be seen as the company of pilgrims on the way to the end of the world and the ends of the earth.

    Lesslie Newbigin⁵

    To push the question further, do the people of God have any responsibility to the rest of human society in general beyond the imperative of evangelism? What content do we put into biblical phrases like being a blessing to the nations, or seeking the welfare of the city, or being the salt of the earth or the light of the world, or doing good (one of the commonest expressions used by Paul and Peter)? Do these concepts figure in our biblical theology of mission?

    Perhaps this sounds like the hoary and familiar debate about the relationship between evangelism and social action, but I hope that our study of biblical theology in the following chapters will take us beyond the traditional polarizing and prioritizing that, in my opinion, so distorts and pulls apart what God intended to be held together. So even a simple expression like the whole world, then, raises all kinds of issues for us. It is geographical (all the earth), but it is also ecological, economic, social and political. And we remember too that the Bible speaks about the end of the world – though it is not so much an end as a new beginning. So the whole world includes time as well as space. The church needs to relate to both. We are sent to the ends of the earth, and we keep going till the end of the world.

    THE WHOLE CHURCH

    Who Are the People of God?

    The Mission of God’s People, announces our title page. Could I not have just used the book’s subtitle, The Church’s Mission? Well, yes perhaps, but only if we have got our biblical theology of the church straight, and that is probably an optimistic assumption. For many Christians, the word church takes them back only to the supposed birthday of the church in the book of Acts on the day of Pentecost. But is that a valid perception? When and where did the people of God come into existence, and for what reason? How does the existence and mission of this people relate to the mission of God in and for his world? When did their mission begin, and how and when will it end?

    Or to put this question another way, how does the mission of the church in the New Testament (that most of us can relate to, since if nothing else we are familiar with the so-called Great Commission and vaguely recall that it comes at the end of a gospel) relate to the identity and history of Old Testament Israel? Did Israel have a mission, and if so, what was it? Indeed, does the Old Testament have any relevance to Christian mission at all – other than a few popular call-stories like Moses, Isaiah and Jeremiah (so useful for missionary sermons), and the object lesson of a single reluctant missionary who was embarrassed and angry at his own success (Jonah)?

    How many sermons have you heard on a missionary Sunday preached from the Old Testament? How many times have you preached a missionary sermon from the Old Testament yourself, if you are a pastor? If the answer is lots and lots, I’d love to hear from you to compare notes, since I try to do it wherever I go. But if the answer is very few or hardly ever, then the point of my question is clear. Where and when do we start in constructing a biblical theology of the mission of God’s people, and what happens if we include the Old Testament?

    So we need to think carefully about what the Bible as a whole has to say about who exactly are God’s people, and in what sense they are (and always have been) a people with a mission. That is why I make no apology for including so much exposition of Old Testament texts in the chapters that follow. After all, the New Testament church did not actually have a New Testament when they set out on the task of world mission. It was the Scriptures of the Old Testament that provided the motivation and justification for their missional practice, as well as the underlying theological assumptions and expectations that reassured them that what they were doing was biblical (as we would say).

    What Kind of People Are We?

    What kind of person is your postman? The question hardly seems to matter at a functional level. Whoever delivers mail to your address has a job to do, and the point is to make sure that the job gets done, not to worry about the morals of the person who does it. The man may have been cheating on his wife the night before, but so long as you get the mail next morning, so long as the message gets delivered to you, that doesn’t matter (to you).

    Unfortunately, there is a danger that the expression "the whole church taking the whole gospel to the whole world turns the church into nothing more than a delivery mechanism for the message. All that matters is getting the job done" – preferably as soon as possible. And sadly there are some forms of missionary strategy and rhetoric that strongly give that impression.

    The Bible, in stark contrast, is passionately concerned about what kind of people they are who claim to be the people of God. If our mission is to share good news, we need to be good news people. If we preach a gospel of transformation, we need to show some evidence of what transformation looks like. So there is a range of questions we need to ask about the whole church that have to do with things like integrity, justice, unity and inclusion, and Christlikeness. The biblical word is holiness, and it is as much a part of our missional identity as of our personal sanctification.

    But should we include ethics in our understanding of mission in this way? Does it not lead to works righteousness and legalism? Surely we should concentrate exclusively on calling people to faith? Well, we may struggle with seeing a tension there, but the apostle Paul saw only integration when he described his own life’s mission as calling all the nations to faith’s obedience. The gospel is something to be obeyed (according to Paul), not just believed. That will lead us to some interesting texts and reflections. Chapters 5 – 8 will explore a variety of biblical texts that stress the ethical dimensions of the mission of God’s people.

    What Are the Priorities and Limits of Our Mission?

    A medical missionary couple I knew had been running a rural hospital in Africa for years when they received a communication from their church in Australia that they had been reclassified as secondary missionaries, because they were not directly engaged in evangelism and church planting (even though fruitful evangelistic work was actually happening among staff and patients at the hospital). Needless to say, this brought them little encouragement. But was such classification biblically legitimate?

    A postman delivers the mail to your home. That is his prime function in life. His job description requires him to do that. Now of course, he may come in and help you fix a blocked drain, if he has time. Or he may offer to carry out the garbage. Or feed the cats while you are away. He may enjoy serving the social needs of the community in lots of little ways, like Postman Pat in the children’s books. But that’s not what his real job is. And some people may even accuse him of wasting his employer’s time on secondary things. He should stick to what he’s sent to do and get the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

    So another question arises in relation to the church’s mission: What exactly is it? Is there something that is primary that makes everything else secondary – however desirable and helpful those other things may be? Once again, the perceived division between evangelism and social action surfaces. Is the church’s mission primarily the delivery of the message of the gospel – in which case the verbal element is all that really matters? Or does the church’s mission include the embodiment of the message in life and action? Sometimes this question is raised as the tension between proclamation and presence. Or between words and works. In some of the chapters below we will explore the integration of what the church is meant to be as well as what the church is meant to say.

    THE WHOLE GOSPEL

    How Big Is Your Gospel?

    This question is clearly linked to those above. What exactly is the gospel that lies at the core of our mission? It is the good news of what God has done through Jesus Christ for the redemption of the world. But what is the scale and scope of God’s redemption? The Bible describes God as Redeemer from very early on.⁶ What content does the word hold for those who spoke of God in that way, and what does it then imply for those who are among the redeemed? What kind of experience is redemption, and what kind of life is then expected of the redeemed? This is something we shall explore in chapter 6.

    One of the dangers with a word like gospel is that we all love it so much (rightly), and want to share it so passionately (rightly again), that we don’t take time to explore its full biblical content. Who invented the word, for example? What did Jesus and Paul mean when they used it – particularly since, as I’ve already said, they had no New Testament to read to tell them. Did they find the gospel in the Old Testament?

    And if it does go back to the Old Testament (as we will see), what does that do to our understanding of what the good news actually is? Once again, we will find that the Bible itself will correct our tendency to reduce the gospel to a solution to our individual sin problem and a swipe card for heaven’s door, and replace that reductionist impression with a message that has to do with the cosmic reign of God in Christ that will ultimately eradicate evil from God’s universe (and solve our individual sin problem too, of course).

    No Other Name

    But at the end of the day, mission is a matter of loyalty. The ambassador must have complete loyalty to the government he or she represents. A trusted messenger will faithfully deliver what his sender said, not his own opinions.

    So the mission of God’s people has to start and finish with commitment to the God whose mission we are called to share. But that in turn depends on knowing our God – knowing God in depth, from experience of his revelation and his salvation. So what exactly is it, then, that we are to know and to remain loyal to? In both testaments, God’s people are called to nonnegotiable, uncompromising loyalty to the uniqueness of God – revealed as YHWH in the Old Testament, and walking among us in the incarnate life of Jesus of Nazareth in the New.

    The mission of God’s people flows from the uniqueness of the God of the Bible, supremely revealed to us in the uniqueness of Christ. That is both the source of our mission (for this is the one who sends us into the world in his name), and also the content of our mission (for all that we say and do is to bear witness to the truth that the Lord is God and there is no other, that Jesus has been given the Name that is above all names, and that there is "no other name given under heaven by which we

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